


Nothing can be sweeter than this

by irisdouglasiana



Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: F/F, not 6b compliant, slowish burn, the major character death is NOT gunnhild or ingrid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:41:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23605462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irisdouglasiana/pseuds/irisdouglasiana
Summary: Without Ingrid even noticing, the universe quietly reorients itself.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 13





	Nothing can be sweeter than this

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kingwellsjaha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kingwellsjaha/gifts).



> CW: mentions of rape.
> 
> (Yes, I know the spoilers for 6b. Yes, I am ignoring them.)

It is the smallest of mercies, Ingrid supposes, that Gunnhild doesn’t ask what happened to her. Head bowed, voice raw with grief, Gunnhild speaks of the dead and dying stretched out for nearly a mile along the shore, Bjorn somewhere among them, one of the warriors saw him fall…she trails off, looking right past the bruises on Ingrid’s neck and the cut on her lip, back to the beach, back to Bjorn.

“It is done,” Ingrid tells her helplessly. “It was fate.”

In all this time, she has never seen Gunnhild weep—not at Lagertha’s funeral, not when she found her lying in Bjorn’s arms, not after the loss of her son. She does not do it now; her mind is already running ahead to the next thing. “We cannot stay here long. The Rus will need time to regroup but then they will send more raiding parties after us,” Gunnhild muses, gazing around the makeshift camp. “King Harald is badly wounded but alive,” she adds as an afterthought. “He may have his own plans, of course. He may want to try to retake his city.”

Ingrid swallows and looks down at Gunnhild’s hands, still covered in blood. She wonders how many men she has killed with them. If she asked her to kill Harald, would she do it? Murder a king and perhaps forfeit her own life, all for the sake of the ex-slave who she caught in her husband’s bed?

She doesn’t dare ask any of those things. She wraps her arms around herself and listens as a dying man calls out for his mother and another dying man shouts at him to shut up. Not far away, she can hear the trickle of water from the nearby stream, and she follows it in her mind, running all the way back to the beach and washing the bodies out to sea. In a few months, a few years, no trace of the battle will be visible—the swords will rust; the broken shields will rot; the bones will sink beneath the sand and be lost.

“What will you do now?” she asks.

Gunnhild smiles tiredly, and for the first time, Ingrid notices the bags under her eyes and the slight slump of her shoulders. “Go back to Kattegat. Fight for as long as possible. Then save what we can. What choice do we have?”

* * *

So they go back to Kattegat. The dead shamble along behind the living, faces tilted up to the sky, seeing nothing. At every mile, they pause to bury the bodies—some seasoned warriors in their prime, others little more than boys. Erik grumbles now and then that the Rus are not far behind and they are losing time, but Gunnhild silences him with a look. She doesn’t need to say, _what kind of a people are we, if we cannot look after our dead?_ She just takes up a shovel and starts to dig.

She helps dig Harald’s grave as well: in the end, there’s no need for Ingrid to ask Gunnhild to kill him, because his men do the job themselves. Ingrid hears the servants whispering that he was stabbed in his tent by a pair of warriors angry over a long string of broken promises and lies. She supposes she should feel happy, or at least relieved, but mostly she just feels hollow. The funeral is subdued, given the circumstances—certainly nothing fit for a king—but the appropriate sacrifices are made and speeches are given, and a few people even shed tears. She numbly watches it all and wonders who would weep for her if she died. _  
_

Long after the ceremonies are over and everyone else has left, Ingrid stands by the grave even as the rain begins to fall. She watches Gunnhild out of the corner of her eye. “Who will be king now?” she asks, suddenly desperate to fill the silence.

“Does it matter? There is no Norway to be king of anymore.” Gunnhild keeps her gaze fixed straight in front of her, not meeting Ingrid’s eyes. “All this time spent fighting each other, all the petty arguments and injured pride and retaliations, just to wear a crown and sit on a chair…well, Harald got what he wanted, in the end. And now here we are, and here he is. I cannot see how it was all worth it.” She pulls her cloak around her and walks away without waiting for Ingrid to respond.

Once she is gone, Ingrid sinks to her knees before the grave. She feels the weight of Harald’s hands on her shoulders and his breath in her ear. “Dead man, go away; I am not afraid of you,” she whispers.

Harald laughs and she freezes. “What a liar you are! What a liar you’ve always been.” His grip on her is like iron; her voice is frozen in her throat. “See, you cannot even deny it, can you? You told Bjorn you would bring him luck and good fortune, and instead you brought disaster and defeat. You said you never wished Gunnhild ill, and yet her child slipped from her womb before he could take his first breath.”

She squeezes her eyes shut, willing herself to breathe. “Let go of me.”

He runs his ghostly fingers along her cheek. “Our secret. Remember?” When she doesn’t respond, he laughs again. “Good girl.”

 _I was not your only secret,_ she suddenly understands. “How many?”

He pauses, hand still lingering on her face. “What?”

“How many were there before me?” When he doesn’t reply, she presses onward. “Or have you forgotten?”

Still no answer. Finally, Ingrid opens her eyes. Harald is not there. No one is there: only a freshly covered grave with the dirt already turning to mud; and the rain beating down on her head and seeping through her clothes, chilling her to the bone.

* * *

Gunnhild comes and sits by her later that evening after the clouds have dissipated and the stars have begun to show themselves one by one. Even with the campfire blazing, Ingrid can’t keep herself from shivering. She glances at Gunnhild and then looks away. She does not want to talk to her about this. She cannot talk to her about this.

“I know something happened,” Gunnhild says quietly. “Why won’t you tell me?”

“Nothing happened.”

She reaches out and takes hold of a lock of Ingrid’s hair, carefully working out the tangles. “You don’t have to lie,” she says. “I’m not your mistress anymore; I will not punish you. You can trust me.”

When Ingrid doesn’t answer, Gunnhild keeps talking. “How long has it been since we met?” she asks. “It must be more than a year now. Except for the time I went to defend Lagertha’s village, I have seen you every day. And yet sometimes I still feel I hardly know you. I look at you and I cannot guess what you are thinking. And it troubles me that I never even wondered about these things until recently.”

Ingrid looks down at Gunnhild’s long fingers winding through her hair. Her skin is rough and chapped and red from the cold. “I remember the first time I saw you; it was the day you were married to Bjorn,” Ingrid recalls. “There was a great table piled with all your wedding presents—jewelry, furs, swords, chests of coins—so many that they were nearly spilling to the floor, do you remember? I was standing there too; I was your gift from Bjorn’s mother, who you admired so much. You looked at me the same way you looked at those things on the table. And then you moved on.”

Gunnhild draws her hand back. “I see that the past is not so easily forgotten,” she says after a moment. “Nor should it be. I am sorry.”

Ingrid shrugs. “I hurt you as well, and I am sorry too. I never thought it would come to this.”

Gunnhild tilts her head back, staring up at the night sky. “I have heard the people saying that the gods abandoned Bjorn. But now I have lost two husbands, my son, and my home. I think they have also abandoned me. And if the gods have abandoned me, what then? What am I to do?”

The silence stretches out and fills the empty space. Ingrid thinks she should say something, offer Gunnhild some sort of comfort. _The gods must mean something by this,_ or _surely there must be a way to regain their favor._ But even in her head she knows the words sound flimsy.

Gunnhild has more to say. “You must forgive me, Ingrid. I did not think kindly of you. I thought you wanted to marry Bjorn not because you loved him, but because you were ambitious and wanted to be queen in my place.”

She knows this was what Gunnhild had always believed about her, but it is another thing to hear her say it out loud. Ingrid wipes her nose and says—because she can say these things now—"If you had to choose, would you choose to be a queen or a slave?”

“I have always been a free woman; I would never choose to be a slave,” Gunnhild answers with a frown, but as soon as the words leave her mouth, Ingrid sees her eyes widen in understanding.

“Well,” she says, “I was not always a slave, and I know what I would rather be. It doesn’t mean that I never had feelings for Bjorn. I knew he was my destiny.” Without Bjorn, she was nobody. With him, she could see a future for herself.

“So you truly loved him, then? Because I would have given my life for Bjorn, if it had come to that.”

Ingrid raises her eyebrows. “Would he have done the same for you?” For a moment, she thinks Gunnhild will slap her, but then she stands up and turns away. They both know the answer to that question. “I’m sorry,” she adds, too late.

“You’re a free woman, Ingrid,” Gunnhild tells her. Her hair shines gold in the firelight but her face is in the shadows. Her voice is low with grief. “You should return to your family. I suppose that is what I would do if I was in your place.”

Ingrid stares at her. Her father is long dead, and her mother and sisters were sold into slavery years ago as she was. She has not seen them since; she cannot be sure if they are even alive.

Gunnhild doesn’t wait for her answer. “Perhaps Erik was right to say this was not a war we could ever hope to win,” she muses, speaking more to herself than to Ingrid. “The alliances are too fragile to last now that Bjorn and Harald are both dead. Even if they had lived, everything still might have fallen apart. This country is like a piece of cloth—all those hours spent weaving it, and a moment to pull the thread that causes the entire thing to unravel.”

Ingrid scoots closer to the fire after she leaves, but even so, she cannot get warm. She shakily runs her fingers through her hair and finds the knots, just as Gunnhild had done. Untangling. Unraveling. Unmaking.

* * *

At last, the remainder of their army rides, limps, and staggers through the gates of Kattegat in a downpour, and this time the crowd doesn’t cheer and wave. News of their defeat and Bjorn’s death has traveled far ahead of them. They huddle together in fearful silence; somewhere towards the back of the crowd, unseen, a woman lets out a howl of grief.

In the great hall, Ingrid watches as Gunnhild stands next to Bjorn’s empty throne and speaks to the people. “Bjorn and King Harald are dead, and the Rus will be here soon,” she tells them. “I know you are tired and afraid. It has been a hard journey for us all. Some of you may think that Kattegat has lost the favor of the gods. I cannot say what the gods have in store for us, but I do know this: we are all responsible for what happens next. We all have a duty to take care of each other. It is not over yet.”

It is not over, but everyone knows it is the end of something and there is no going back to the way things were before. That first night, Ingrid goes back to her old room, pulls her furs tightly around her, and shivers in her empty bed. Every sound is amplified in the darkness, and though she cannot see the ghosts that flit around in the rafters, she can still feel their icy breath on her exposed skin. It had never been this way when Bjorn was there—like the sun, he had always radiated heat; sometimes it had almost been too much. He never told her he loved her and she never asked. She misses his warmth anyway.

Finally, when she can no longer bear the silence, she gets up and tiptoes her way to Gunnhild’s room. In the moonlight, she sees Gunnhild glance over her shoulder to look at her before turning her face back to the wall without a word. But then she shifts on the bed and makes a space for her, and Ingrid joins her under the covers. She listens to the sound of Gunnhild breathing until she falls asleep.

In her dream, the seer comes to her, and she feels his breath on the back of her neck as she stands in attendance on Bjorn and Gunnhild like she used to do when she was a slave. For their part, Bjorn and Gunnhild talk quietly to each other, paying her no mind—though from time to time, Bjorn’s gaze begins to wander in her direction, until Gunnhild notices and he returns his attention to her. How many times did Ingrid take part in this silent three-way conversation? _I am not jealous_ , Gunnhild insisted again and again, and maybe she even believed it. Ingrid never did.

“I thought Bjorn was my destiny,” Ingrid murmurs to the seer. “Was I wrong?”

The seer laughs, and she shudders. “Your destiny is in front of your eyes,” he says. “To see it, you need only look.”

“That is no answer at all. Bjorn is dead.”

“So he is. My answer is still the same.”

She finds herself focusing on Gunnhild’s hands—the gold ring on her finger, her neatly trimmed nails. “Why won’t you speak plainly? Tell me what you really mean.”

No answer—she turns her head to look, but the seer is already gone. When she looks back, Gunnhild and Bjorn are both watching her, waiting for her to speak.

After she wakes in the morning, it takes her a moment to remember where she is. Gunnhild’s side of the bed is already empty, but when Ingrid stretches out her hand, she finds her pillow is still warm.

* * *

Kattegat prepares again for war. Gunnhild and the warriors spend sleepless nights in the great hall debating strategy, the men cut down trees to make shields and stakes, and the air is filled all day with the sound of the blacksmiths hammering out swords. The experienced fighters put axes in the hands of young children and old women and teach them how to swing their weapons with enough force to maim and kill. There is not a moment to waste, nor a body that cannot be pressed into this fight.

“You know how to do this,” Gunnhild notes with surprise as she watches Ingrid expertly fletch an arrow. She picks up one of the arrows Ingrid has already finished and runs her fingers across the feathers, admiring her work.

“Of course I do,” Ingrid says. Without looking up, she uses her knife to make a series of precise cuts in the shaft. “I may not be a shieldmaiden, but I have spent all my life either surviving wars or preparing for the next one.”

“I may be a shieldmaiden, but it doesn’t mean I can fletch an arrow.”

Ingrid can’t help it. For the first time in a long time, she laughs, and after a moment, a smile spreads across Gunnhild’s face.

* * *

Erik approaches her while she is working with the others to reinforce the outer walls and asks her to marry him. "Gunnhild may be queen," he explains, "but she has no heir and has not remarried, and Ubbe has left for Iceland and may not return—so should any misfortune befall Gunnhild, who then would rule Kattegat? For the truth is, being king is not about who one’s father was or what he did: any man can be king if he wants it badly enough, and it is the same for any woman who wants to be queen."

His case made, he crosses his arms and waits for her answer. She can tell from the look on his face that he is certain she will say yes.

“You asked Gunnhild to marry you first, and she refused,” Ingrid says instead, and when she sees Erik flinch, she knows it is true.

“She told you that?”

“No,” she tells him. “But I know when I am the second choice. Regardless, my answer is no.”

He doesn’t argue or become angry at her refusal, but once he is gone, her stomach suddenly rebels and she bends over and vomits. She drops to her knees and can’t stop herself from shaking.

That evening after dinner, she paces around her room with a knife in her hand, palms slick with sweat as she listens for the sound of footsteps outside the door. ( _Do you think that will stop a man from taking what he wants?_ Harald sneers. _I knew you were a liar and a thief, now I know you for a fool as well._ )

The hours pass and nothing happens. She paces and paces, trying to stay vigilant, but at last her eyelids growing heavy and she finally collapses onto the bed from exhaustion. When she opens her eyes again, it is pitch black and there is a crushing weight on her chest. She opens her mouth to scream and no sound comes out. She reaches blindly for the knife, but the thing presses down harder and pins her arms at her sides.

 _Liar,_ it hisses. _Fool. Thief._

 _Go away_ , she wants to shout at it, but the more she struggles the more it squeezes the air from her lungs. She feels like she is drowning.

_Liar. Fool. Thief. Liar. Fool. Thief. Liarfoolthief—_

She nearly falls out of bed when she hears a soft knock on the door. “Who’s there?” she cries out in terror. She looks around wildly for her foe but the room is empty.

“Gunnhild,” comes the muffled answer on the other side.

Ingrid forces herself to exhale. _It was just a dream,_ she tells herself, even though some part of her knows that is not true. She quickly tucks the knife away underneath the bed before opening the door. Gunnhild is standing there in just her shift and staring down at her bare feet, and somehow, to Ingrid's eyes, she looks small. “May I come in?” she asks quietly. After a moment, Ingrid steps aside.

Before Ingrid had married Bjorn, they had transformed a storage room in the great hall so she could have her own chamber—just a small, dusty room without windows, but they had brought in a comfortable bed and hung tapestries on the walls and made it into something suitable for the second wife of a king. Gunnhild never set foot inside it. Now she takes it all in silently before returning her attention to Ingrid. “Forgive my intrusion,” she says. “I didn’t want to be alone tonight.”

“Neither do I,” Ingrid admits.

They don’t say much after that, and if Gunnhild notices the beads of sweat on Ingrid’s forehead or her flushed cheeks, she does not remark on it. She stretches herself out on Ingrid’s bed and closes her eyes. Ingrid climbs in beside her and after a little while, she reaches for Gunnhild’s hand. She doesn’t let go.

Ingrid thinks she will lie there awake for the rest of the night, but somehow she manages to fall asleep again for a few hours. Just before dawn, Ingrid wakes to find that in the night, Gunnhild has pulled her close and draped her arm over her waist. She carefully moves Gunnhild’s arm to the side and gets up. Underneath her bed she discovers a large tangled clump of dark hair that oozes grease. In her head, she can still hear the voice, but it is much fainter now: _Liar. Fool. Thief_ …

Without waking Gunnhild, she quietly gets dressed and wraps the thing in a piece of cloth. She carries it out to the woods far outside the gates of the city. When she finds a suitable place she lights a fire and burns it, and watches until the flames extinguish themselves and the embers cool. Then she grinds the ashes under her feet. “You are nothing to me anymore,” she tells it.

That night, she sleeps better than she has in months.

* * *

“Do you think I am hard to love?”

Ingrid rolls over on her side to look at Gunnhild. In the dark, she can make out the curve of her jawline; the sliver of moonlight reflected in her eyes. By now she shares a bed with her more often than not—Gunnhild has never invited her in, but she has never told her to stay away either. “What are you talking about?” she asks.

“It was something Bjorn said to me once,” Gunnhild explains. “I did not think much of it back then, but now I think about it all the time. I wonder if he was right. If I was easier to love, then perhaps he would not have looked to you for comfort.” She closes her eyes. “But I suppose it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“You were afraid he would leave you if you made him choose between us.”

Gunnhild opens her eyes again and swallows. “Bjorn’s mother left his father when he fell in love with another woman. My father left my mother for someone else. I told myself I would not be like her, standing in the doorway and watching him ride away. Yes, I was afraid.”

“If you father had stayed, what would have been different?”

Gunnhild just looks at her, anguished, and for a moment Ingrid thinks she will order her to leave. Then she shakes her head. “I don’t know. Perhaps they would have worked through their problems in time. But I have also seen too many unhappy husbands and wives, more miserable together than they would be apart, and that is no way to live either. Maybe my mother was hard to love, like me.”

“I think Bjorn was wrong,” Ingrid says, reaching out to take her hand. “I think if you love other people, then you are easy to love.”

Gunnhild smiles at her sadly, and in the dark, Ingrid can just see the outline of a tear running down her cheek. “What if I don’t believe you?”

 _She is so beautiful this way_ , Ingrid thinks to herself. Of course Gunnhild’s beauty was always unmistakable, but this—this feels like something else: the universe quietly reorienting itself to fill a space she never realized was there before. Her heart flutters in her chest. “Well, then,” she hears herself say in a shaky voice, “Will you let me show you?”

She can barely hear Gunnhild’s answer. “Yes.”

Ingrid draws her close and kisses her, slow and soft and unhurried. With Bjorn, Ingrid had never felt any particular urge to be tender, nor he with her—but with Gunnhild, she wants nothing more than to take her time. When she pulls back to catch her breath, she waits for Gunnhild to protest and say they shouldn’t do this. Instead, she reaches out and runs her fingers along Ingrid’s chin, cupping her face. “Don’t stop,” Gunnhild pleads softly. “Kiss me again.”

So Ingrid does it again and again. She kisses every inch of her; she discovers the secret places that make her moan in delight and gasp her name, and when she’s finished, Gunnhild takes her turn and flips her onto her back as though she weighs nothing. She gives Ingrid an almost mischievous smile as she draws her hands down her body, tracing her fingers around her breasts and along her thighs until Ingrid can barely keep herself from shaking with anticipation. “Gunnhild, _please_ ,” she practically begs, and finally, _finally_ , she obliges. Now Ingrid is the one to tremble at the touch of Gunnhild’s lips on her skin; to cry out and grip her wrists almost hard enough to bruise as waves of pleasure sweep through her body and make her forget everything else. The universe expands and shrinks until it becomes just her and Gunnhild, Gunnhild and her—and _oh_ , she thinks, _nothing can be sweeter than this._

* * *

“Do you believe me now?” Ingrid asks Gunnhild afterwards, curled up in her arms as the sweat dries on her back.

Gunnhild smiles. “I do.”

“What about me; do you think I am easy to love?”

She kisses her once more and laughs. Ingrid thinks it is the most beautiful sound she has ever heard. “Very.”

* * *

There are too many portents these days. Birds fall from the sky and the wind carries the phantom screams of dying men; the desperate refugees fleeing the Rus tell tales of trees dripping blood from their trunks and animals warning of doom in human languages. One man claims that he saw the great serpent under the sea lift its head above the water for a moment before sinking back down, though nobody believes that.

More than portents, there are reports that trickle in from passing traders and spies—villages attacked in the south; the Rus cutting down entire forests to build new ships, though a series of large summer storms interrupts their progress for a little while. Gunnhild listens and thanks each messenger for the information they bring her, sitting up straight on the throne with her hands folded on her lap and showing no sign of agitation or fear. She only allows herself to fall apart at night when she is in bed with Ingrid. She talks in circles and sometimes weeps in Ingrid’s arms, her face lined with worry, and Ingrid kisses the top of her head and strokes her hair until she falls asleep.

But sometimes Ingrid is the one who falls to pieces, and when that happens Gunnhild squeezes her hand and whispers her name in the dark. Gunnhild says, I want to know what is in your mind; I want to know who you really are. She says, Ingrid, tell me what you are afraid of.

 _I am afraid that I will give away too much of myself to you, or too little, and one night you will leave and I will wake up alone,_ Ingrid wants to tell her. _I am afraid that the Rus will arrive any day now and it will be the end of you and I, just when I started to believe it was possible for there to be an_ us _._

“I think I have fallen in love with you,” Ingrid confesses.

Gunnhild arches an eyebrow. “You think, or you know?” she teases, and Ingrid can’t stop herself from blushing. “Because I _know_ I have fallen in love with you.” She carefully brushes the hair back from Ingrid’s forehead and leans in to kiss her, and one kiss leads to another, and another, and another.

In the morning, the horns may sound when the Rus ships are spotted on the horizon. The warriors will kiss their families and take up their swords and their shields, knowing that the gods have already chosen which among their number will soon be feasting in Valhalla. Tomorrow may be the end of everything. The sun may set on a different world.

But tonight—Gunnhild’s hands around her waist, lips grazing her collarbone, sighing her name—tonight belongs to them.


End file.
